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Reuters report adds to a year of bad news for Yahoo

Yahoo! users were rightly upset in August when they learned that the company had been hacked, and information of as many as 500 million accounts was stolen and now for sale on the Dark Web. Vice.com broke the news on its Motherboard site.

You think that’s bad; it gets worse. Reuters reported today that the company gave U.S. intelligence officials access to all of its customers incoming emails. The government was reportedly looking for a specific set of characters, but it’s not known whether or not officials from the National Security Agency or the FBI found what they were looking for.

The company wouldn’t confirm or deny the Reuters report, only say that Yahoo follows the laws of the United States. But Reuters says that the decision to assist the NSA with its sweep led to the departure of then-Chief Information Security Officer Alex Stamos, who now works at Facebook.

Companies complying with government requests for massive amounts of data is nothing new. In the mid-2000s, the heart of the Patriot Act era, only one major telecom company, Qwest (now CenturyLink), refused NSA requests for phone records. So we shouldn’t be surprised that Yahoo would be such a willing participant in another form of government surveillance.

But this is a different era, and customers are arguably more concerned about their own privacy than they were 10 years ago. It will be tough to rebuild trust after these two stories, each reflecting the extremes of the spectrum of privacy concerns.

Between the data breach and this willingness to help the feds snoop its users, Yahoo is having a bad, bad year.